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ALSO BY JASPER FFORDE

The Eyre AffairLost in a Good BookThe Well of Lost Plots

I tried to imagine the whole room full of Shakespeare clones clattering away at their typewriters. . . .

Frontispiece and text illustrations by Maggy and Stewart RobertsFrederick Warne & Co. is the owner of all rights, copyrights, and trademarksin the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations.

Publisher’s Note:This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, andincidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book has been bundled withSpecial Features,includingThe Making ofdocumentary, deleted scenes from all four books,outtakes and much more.

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Dramatis Personae

Thursday Next:Ex-operative from Swindon’s Literary Detective office of SpecOps-27 and currently head of Jurisfiction, the policing agency that operates within fiction to safeguard the stability of the written word.

Friday Next:Thursday’s son, age two.

Granny Next:Resident of Goliath Twilight Homes, Swindon. Age 110 and cannot die until she has read the ten most boring classics.

Wednesday Next:Thursday’s mother. Resides in Swindon.

Landen Parke-Laine:Thursday’s husband, who hasn’t existed since he was eradicated in 1947 by the Goliath Corporation, eager to blackmail Miss Next.

Mycroft Next:Inventor uncle of Thursday and last heard of living in peaceful retirement within the backstory of the Sherlock Holmes series. Designer of Prose Portal and Sarcasm Early-Warning Device, amongst many other things. Husband toPolly.

Colonel Next:A time-traveling knight errant, he was eradicated by the ChronoGuard, a sort of temporal policing agency. Despite this, he is still about and meets Thursday from time to time.

Cat formerly known as Cheshire:The ex-Wonderland überlibrarian at the Great Library and Jurisfiction agent.

Pickwick:A pet dodo of very little brain.

Bowden Cable:Colleague of Thursday’s at the Swindon Literary Detectives.

Victor Analogy:Head of Swindon Literary Detectives.

Braxton Hicks:Overall commander of the Swindon Special Operations Network.

Yorrick Kaine:Whig politician and publishing media tycoon. Also right-wing Chancellor of England, soon to be made dictator. Fictional, and sworn enemy of Thursday Next.

President George Formby:Octogenarian President of England and deeply opposed to Yorrick Kaine and all that he stands for.

Wales:A Socialist Republic.

Lady Emma Hamilton:Consort of Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson and lush. Upset when her husband inexplicably died at the beginning of the Battle of Trafalgar. Lives in Mrs. Next’s spare room.

Hamlet:A Danish prince with a propensity for prevarication.

SpecOps:Short for Special Operations, the governmental departments that deal with anything too rigorous for the ordinary police to handle. Everything from time travel to good taste.

Bartholomew Stiggins:Commonly known as “Stig.” Neanderthal reengineered from extinction, he heads SpecOps-13 (Swindon), the policing agency responsible for reengineered species such as mammoths, dodos, saber-toothed tigers and chimeras.

Chimera:Any unlicensed “nonevolved life-form” created by a hobby genetic sequencer. Illegal and destroyed without mercy.

St. Zvlkx:A thirteenth-century saint whose revealments have an uncanny knack of coming true.

SuperHoop:The World Croquet League finals. Usually violent, always controversial.

Lola Vavoom:An actress who does not feature in this novel but has to appear in the Dramatis Personae due to a contractual obligation.

Minotaur:Half-man, half-bull son of Pasiphaë, the Queen of Crete. Escaped from custody and consequently a PageRunner. Whereabouts unknown.

1.

A Cretan Mino taurin Nebraska

Jurisfictionis the name given to the policing agencyinsidebooks. Working with the intelligence-gathering capabilities of Text Grand Central, the many Prose Resource Operatives at Jurisfiction work tirelessly to maintain the continuity of the narrative within the pages of all the books ever written. Performing this sometimes thankless task, Jurisfiction agents live mostly on their wits as they attempt to reconcile the author’s original wishes and readers’ expectations against a strict and largely pointless set of bureaucratic guidelines laid down by the Council of Genres. I headed Jurisfiction for over two years and was always astounded by the variety of the work: one day I might be attempting to coax the impossibly shy Darcy from the toilets, and the next I would be thwarting the Martians’ latest attempt to invadeBarnaby Rudge. It was challenging and full of bizarre twists. But when the peculiar and downright weird becomes commonplace, you begin to yearn for the banal.